On a crisp afternoon in December, a friend and I sat in an idling car at the corner of Las Flores Canyon Road and the Pacific Coast Highway, in Malibu, preparing to witness a performance of “Wagner Drive,” a large-scale audiovisual work by the artist David Hockney. We were the sole audience for the piece, and also its executants. My friend drove; I operated the stereo. When the clock read 4:09 P.M.—forty minutes before sunset—I hit Play on the sequence of recordings that Hockney has specified for the event. The Wagner did not begin right away: first came “America,” from “West Side Story.” As we headed north on the P.C.H., the lyrics complemented a panorama of motels, pizza places, surf shops, and car-rental outfits: “Automobile in America, / Chromium steel in America, / Wire-spoke wheel in America, / Very big deal in America!”
With a rightward turn onto Malibu Canyon Road, the beginning of a twisting climb into the Santa Monica Mountains, landscape and music changed in tandem. “America” gave way to an orchestral arrangement of the Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla, from “Das Rheingold.” (The Wagner items on Hockney’s playlist come from albums that Adrian Boult made with the London Philharmonic and the London Symphony in the early nineteen-seventies.) The raw might of the sound—rugged brass figures jutting through hazy string arpeggios—reinforced the geological drama of our ascent: the Santa Monica Mountains rise straight from the sea, their tilted sedimentary layers and volcanic formations evidence of tectonic mayhem at the border between the North American and the Pacific plates.
After four and a half miles, we turned right on Piuma Road, which climbs seventeen hundred feet, to the top of a ridge. At almost the same moment, the mystical prelude to “Parsifal,” Wagner’s final opera, began to unfurl. The weightless sonorities and blended timbres of the composer’s late style suited the veering, dissolving perspectives of the drive: sun-drenched south-facing mountains, purple-tinted inland ranges, road-hugging rock faces, occasional vistas of a now distant ocean. A hilltop mid-century-modern home, struck by the slanting winter sun, became a sleek update of Monsalvat, Wagner’s Grail Temple. The brass choir of the Dresden Amen harmonized with the mountain-and-ocean panorama of the Malibu Canyon Overlook, although the blare of brass from our car distracted a couple who were trying to have a romantic moment.
Nine minutes before sunset, we turned left onto Las Flores Canyon Road, which would lead us back to our point of departure. The soundtrack was now Siegfried’s Funeral Music, the memorial to the failed hero of the “Ring.” The first part of this descending leg took place in deep shadow, as the road briefly swerved north before heading back south. The muffled drumbeats of Siegfried’s funeral procession matched the loss of light and the onset of a nighttime chill. As Hockney intended, the orange disk of the sun reappeared over a gray-blue ocean just as the orchestra moved into the major and intoned Siegfried’s leitmotifs at high volume—a magnificent, valedictory mood. None of the filmmakers who live in the vicinity could have more perfectly choreographed this golden-hour blend of sight and sound.
Eventually, as in every Hollywood phantasmagoria, illusion surrendered to reality. The Funeral Music wound to its close as the road straightened out and houses became crowded together. Malibu’s beach culture reasserted itself: weathered Siegfrieds toted surfboards back to their cars. Wagner’s grandeur took on an ironic, melancholic tinge, promising a state of transcendence that contemporary existence was bound to foreclose. Still, when the sun plunged into the ocean on cue, it was like no other sunset I had seen—the final frame of a live film with an invisible director.
Hockney, with his utopian explosions of primal color, might seem a curious fit for Wagner, the master of shadow and foreboding. Nonetheless, the composer has long been one of Hockney’s musical favorites. The painter has attended the Bayreuth Festival three times, and in 1987 he designed a production of “Tristan und Isolde” for the Los Angeles Opera. Around the same time, he bought a beach house at the bottom of Las Flores Canyon, and in the early nineties he began plotting mountain routes that could be timed with Wagner selections. These expeditions informed his ideas about the play of light on landscape, both on canvas and in the theatre. When he experienced hearing loss, he had his Mercedes outfitted with a potent stereo system. Friends and fellow-artists were invited along for the ride.
There are actually three Wagner drives: the Malibu Canyon route; a more extended traversal of the Santa Monica Mountains, which involves going up Kanan Dume Road; and an excursion in the San Gabriel Mountains, well to the east, which is closer to Hockney’s principal Los Angeles home, in the Hollywood Hills. Until recently, the capacity to perform “Wagner Drive” rested exclusively with Hockney, but in 2016 the art historian Arthur Kolat completed a master’s thesis on the subject, in the course of which he interviewed Hockney and codified directions and musical cues for the drives. Kolat passed them on to me, and this past summer I started trying them out. These adventures had the virtue of adhering to even the strictest pandemic-era restrictions: I could attend performances without leaving my car.
In what sense is “Wagner Drive” an art work? Kolat’s thesis takes up that question, suggesting that the drives may have begun as a lark and then taken on larger creative significance. Certainly, they cast light on the rest of Hockney’s œuvre. Around 1990, he produced a dozen or so sizable paintings—“Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica” is the biggest, measuring six and a half feet by ten feet—that replicate vistas from the Malibu drives. Their brash colors seem unreal, and yet the slash of red-orange at the top of a bluish slope in “Thrusting Rocks” is faithful to the heightened sensory impact of the Wagner experience. Similar hues appeared in Hockney’s lustrous opera stagings, which include “Tristan,” “The Rake’s Progress,” “The Magic Flute,” and a Stravinsky triple bill.
In musical terms, the drives dwell on the cinematic side of Wagner, emphasizing spectacular surfaces over psychological depths. When you hear the bombastic Entrance of the Gods during the ascent into the mountains, you forget the dark subtext of the “Rheingold” finale—the Rhinemaidens decrying the hollowness of the spectacle, Loge laughingly predicting doom. The otherworldly beauties of “Parsifal” become divorced from the sickly decadence of life at the Grail Temple. The experience borders on kitsch, but in a bracing way. Inserting the “Ring” and “Parsifal” into an echt-American road ritual banishes the portentousness of Wagner discourse and restores a sense of make-believe. The bouncy Bernstein prelude puts you in the right mind-set. (The San Gabriel drive leads off with Sousa marches.)
Sometimes I felt a real sense of wonder. When I tried out the Kanan Dume drive, which lasts for about ninety minutes, road construction prevented a turn onto Mulholland Drive, which in this area is woodsier and more rustic than on its famous ridgetop stretches to the east. So I made a detour, staying on Kanan Dume Road awhile longer. At the moment the Entrance of the Gods ended, I entered a tunnel, and the “Parsifal” prelude kicked in just as I emerged. The change accorded with another geological shift, into a landscape marked by the Conejo volcanic formation: orange-brown tones gave way to paler, starker colors. Wagner set his opera in the “northern mountains of Gothic Spain,” but this austere terrain would have served just as well.
“The drive into the Santa Monica Mountains is a bit like Monsalvat, isn’t it?” Hockney said to me, during a video call the other day. The artist, who is eighty-three, has spent the pandemic year in Normandy, France, where he recently bought a seventeenth-century house—a “Seven Dwarves house,” he calls it. He was dressed in his usual pastel tones, with circular yellow-framed glasses perched on his nose.
When I asked about the origin of “Wagner Drive,” Hockney said, “Well, the first thing I did was, when I was driving once to Las Vegas—past Las Vegas, to Zion Park—I listened to Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ and I realized that all religions come from the desert, from someone contemplating the cosmos in the desert.” That advisory aside, he emphasized the playfulness of his Wagner conceit: “I took some kids on it once, and they said, ‘Oh, this is like a movie,’ and I realized, Well, they would never have listened to the ‘Parsifal’ prelude just sitting at home.”
The notion that “Wagner Drive” could take on a life of its own, even without the artist’s supervision, pleased him. “Yes, it could be adapted by anybody,” he told me. I posed the question that Kolat had contemplated before me: In what sense are the drives art works or performances? Hockney answered, “When I did them, I could take only two people in the car. But I did realize it was a kind of performance piece or performance art. It was now. It was only now—when it was over, it was gone. Performance is now, isn’t it? It has to be now.” ♦
